Tablet PC
A Head Above Laptops?

Windows owns the lion's share of the laptop and desktop markets. Today they seem to also have ambitious plans to take over a market that might just be catching up - that of Tablet PC's.

At the Comdex computer show in Las Vegas, Bill Gates introduced this new product and displayed a working model of one such PC. This two tone orange tablet appears to be a good spin-off of the iMac and the Clipboard. With an average specs (a 10- gigabyte hard drive and a 600-megahertz processor) the tablet has no keyboard. The Microsoft claims that the wireless networking facilities as well as the full touch screen feature, is sure to put this product above the laptops.

Handwriting on the screen with a stylus gives forth digital ink. Without any translation of this handwritten text into typed form the computer goes on to store every word as a graphic object. This can be moved, inserted or deleted by making use of the stylus. To make the graphics appear in bold or in italic form all that needs to be done is to fatten or slant them. Matching shapes may do handwriting search.

So far there has been no indication from anyone as to how handwriting may fare in today's scenario where it is almost becoming an extinct art. Hence how popular can such a tablet get? Any answers?